CHAPTER XXVIII

The Allusiveness of Modern Poetry

Tehee! Tehee! O sweet delight! He tickles this age who can Call Tullia’s ape a marmosyte, And Leda’s goose a swan! _Anon_.

We have distinguished between impulses which are involved at all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying with the stage, and those which do not go off at all except in developed minds. The responses of the non-mathematical and the mathematical mind to a formula illustrate the difference. It is the use of responses not available without special experience, which more than anything else narrows the range of the artist’s communication and creates the gulf between expert and popular taste.

In the second chorus of _Hellas_ in the middle of the second stanza the rhythm, tune, and handling, though not the metre, become suddenly uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of tone, a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of movement belong to the fifth and following lines:

A mortal shape to him Was like the vapour dim Which the orient planet animates with light. Hell, sin, and slavery, came, Like bloodhounds mild and tame, Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.

And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the fever, the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the first stanza, or of the closing lines of the second:

The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set: While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon, The Cross leads generations on.

The difference is difficult to describe except perhaps: by the aid of a musical notation. It is like the difference between two voices, and in spite of the highly characteristic matter[71] of the lines, the reader feels that not Shelley but some other poet is speaking. What Shelley is doing becomes unmistakable in the third and last stanza. The corresponding lines, again in clear contrast with the lines surrounding them, have the same strange modulation:

So fleet, so faint, so fair, The Powers of Earth and Air Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem. Apollo, Pan and Love, And even Olympian Jove, Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.

In a manner more familiar perhaps in music than in poetry Shelley is echoing another poem, borrowing, as it were, Milton’s voice though not his words, making in fact a musical quotation, a poetical allusion of an exquisite felicity.

But by so doing he is necessarily restricting the number of the readers who will fully appreciate him.

Such allusions are a normal and regular part of the resources of all poets who belong to the literary tradition, that is to say, of the vast majority of poets in modern times. They are not often so unobtrusive and the place which they are given in the structure of the poem varies. Sometimes, as in this instance, a failure on the part of the reader has no important consequences. One familiar with the _Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity_ will respond more fully and with a deeper sense of the situation; but a reader unfamiliar with it is not deprived of any major part of the poem. In other cases the loss is more serious. Another instance from Shelley will illustrate this, and it is interesting for its own sake. The Shape which guides the Chariot in the _Triumph of Life_ is described and identified for the reader in a large degree through another Miltonic quotation or allusion:

A Shape So sate within, as one whom years deform, Beneath a dusky hood and double cape, Crouching within the shadow of a tomb, And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape Was bent.

Shelley, it is known, crystallised much of his philosophy in the sentence: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life’, and the reference[72] here to the guardian of Hell Gate,

What seem’d his head The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on,

is not accidental or unimportant for the understanding of the poem.

Some care is needed in considering the problem of allusions. There may be worthy and unworthy motives behind their employment ad their enjoyment. There are some to whom a familiarity with literature occasions a sense of superiority over others which is trivial and mean. The pleasure of recognition, proportional as it is to the difficulty or unobtrusiveness of the allusion is a thing of slight value, not to be confused with literary or poetic values. It is perfectly possible for a reader, familiar with the _Nativity Hymn_, for example, to receive all that Shelley intended without ever noticing the allusion, without, that is to say, any recognition. But the erudite often forget that this happens. To turn the capacity of recognising recondite references into a shibboleth by which culture may be estimated is a perversion to which scholarly persons are too much addicted. The point is worth mentioning, since this snobbishness, percolating down (or, if the metaphor be preferred, by repercussion) is responsible for much insincerity and timidity, for wrong attitudes of many kinds towards literature, for irritation and oppression developing into distaste and neglect of poetry. Allusion is a trap for the writer almost as effective as for the academic critic. It invites insincerity. It may encourage and disguise laziness. When it becomes a habit it is a disease. But these dangers form no ground for denying to allusion, and the similar resources of which it is typical, a fit and justifiable place in poetry.

Allusion is the most striking of the ways in which poetry takes into its service elements and forms of experience which are not inevitable to life but need to be specially acquired. And the difficulty which it raises is merely a special instance of a general communicative difficulty which will probably increase for the poetry of the future. All the thought and feeling of recent man goes on in terms of experience which is much more likely to be special and peculiar to the individual, than, let us say, the experience of medieval man. The survival of medieval man on such a vast scale among us should not mislead in this matter. The people who are most keenly and variously interested, that is to say, the people whose lives are most valuable on our theory of value, the people for whom the poet writes and by his appeal to whom he is judged, inevitably build up their minds with far more varied elements than has ever been the case before. And the poet, in so far as he is equal to his opportunities, does the same. It is hard, and, in fact, impossible, to deny him his natural and necessary resources on the ground that a majority of his readers will not understand. This is not his fault but the fault of the social structure. Given present conditions and future developments in the directions indicated by the changes of the last two hundred years, it is extremely probable that poets will become not less but more allusive, that their work will depend more and more not only upon other poetry but upon all manner of special fields of familiarity.[73] Many of the finest and most widely significant experiences, and those therefore most suitable for poetry, come nowadays, for example, through reading pieces of advanced research. There is nothing new in this, of course, nothing that was not happening when Donne wrote. The difficulty springs from the fact that research is so much further ahead than it used to be.

[71] Cf. _Prometheus Unbound_, Act 1:

‘the air around them looks radiant as the air around a star’;

also _Triumph of Life_: ‘as veil by veil the silent splendour drops From Lucifer’.

[72] _Paradise Lost_, Bk. II, line 672.

[73] A very interesting contemporary example in connection with which the problem arises perhaps more acutely than ever before is Mr Eliot’s _The Waste Land_ already mentioned. The impatience of so many critics and the fact that they have complained of the presence and necessity of notes well illustrates the confusion which prevails upon this question. A more reasonable complaint would have been that Mr Eliot did not provide a larger apparatus of elucidation. (See Appendix).